Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

Shigor's Trophies

Archive for the ‘LD #23’ Category

So, the time has come to write some post mortem (in not so hidden hope that my game will have a chance to mess with heads of more poor victims).

Introducing Tiny Inspiration, adventure game about LD programmer who searches for inspiration in his dreams and finds himself tiny, on his own table. As you can see from the thumbnail, it’s a bit (cough, cough) adult theme. Although no actual porn takes place, sex is what is this about. It was my intention to mess up a bit with people’s head and since most of the people in LD are guys (sorry for you, girls, but unless I’m seriously mistaken, there’s not much of you here… anyway if you drop me a comment declaring yourself a girl and demanding woman themed game next time, I’ll consider it).

Even before LD started I was thinking about maybe making and adventure game (doing two commercial right now so I got them stuck in my head now…). When the theme was announced (3 am of my time), I scratched my head and went to sleep, hoping for some inspiration. About the only dream I remember was really weird one with two headed redhead…

Next morning (actually, more like noon) I went for brunch with my GF and started brainstorming. Soon enough I’ve scratched all other ideas (sperm racing game, battle bugs clone, Tron like shooter) and focused on the adventure. From the start I knew I wanted to have some sex hints there and that I want as many possibilities to finish the game as possible. With that came idea of giving player achievements and then that I should really try to rattle player’s bones.

Originally I wanted to have three episodes with three screens each. First on the table, than among the bugs, and in the end having player to find love among amoebas and bacterias. Quickly found out that my ideas are just spilling too fast so I concentrated on the table. I started making design notes and quickly sketching screens.

I originally planned 8 game screens, one intro, one outro and one noninteractive in the middle. I had some ideas for more, but even than I was pretty sure it would be tight run against the time. Sketching was fast, each sketch took me about five minutes, so I was full of optimism!

Then I fired up photoshop and picked tablet… and found out that I just really really suck. I have no problems with pencil, I’m even able to produce quite nice drawings, but tablet… horrible. Took me a too long time to finish first screen and then I started to cut corners so I can make it in time. I grossly underestimated how long it will take me just to redraw finished scanned sketch and add some colors

So I had to put out intro that was supposed to be a bit interactive, with player killing bad ideas (like sex, go to sleep) and promoting ideas like RPG, adventure etc. In the end Yoda was suppossed to show up (probably in a blond wig :D) and tell player INSPIRATION YOU’LL NOT FIND, IT WILL FIND YOU!

Outro was also cut out, with protagonist girlfriend waking him up and asking him why he’s sleeping on her dollhouse instead of making that stupid game. (And if player shaved himself in the game, she would have asked “and why have you shaven your beard, honey?”).

And one of the game screen went out of the window too (Ken trying to enroll in french legion to show Barbie that he’s man, fluffy dog doll, which could have been converted into dog disguise for more achievements, some other stuff).

So in the end, 8 screens, one of them almost without any interaction, few dozen active items, 11 achievements, and two goals, with 4 possible ways to reach it for each.

While doing all the art and exporting it out from photoshop I fired up Unity. I decided to use it again because a) I’m quite confident I can force it to do anything I want, although sometimes painfully for both of us, b) it gives me possibility to do web / flash version (I’m still mostly untouched by html5 and flash, so it’s the only way I can make web games now), c) abusing full fledged 3d engine for a simple 2d “art” is amusing

Putting items into screens, doing some basic scripts took me almost no time at all. About the only problem I had was stupid unity gui (last time fixes while trying to get flash version working introduced so stupid bugs in the inventory that I had to do quick bug elimination after compo) and flash export ignoring anonymous functions (had to rewrite them, luckily I had no time to implement some better dialogues anyway).

I ended up with playable game about ten minutes before the end of the compo…. So ideas about some sounds, music (at least from autotracker) and having some interactive dialogues just went out the window :/

Once again I’ve found out how much I suck when I try to draw something on the tablet, so I’ll stick with the “art” I’m using always (should have stayed at sketching with pencil and scanning it in computer… it’s faster and looks much better).

Anyway, first scene is finished, now seven more and code it all together….
(And hope I won’t get kicked up for “adult” take on both LD and the theme…

Alright, I have basics of what I wanted to do written, going to do an FPV adventure. I’ve planned 4 chapters originally, but it will end as one but polished, because there’s no way I’d be able to do more, especially considering that I want different posibilities to solve two main problems in the first chapter (you’ll be rated in the end based on your decisions, I already can see some people screaming 😉

Time to fire up tablet (I’ll probably post some WIP images if they’ll look good enough, this time I’m trying to do something looking a bit more like art then random scratches)

I’ve waited for the theme, brainstormed a little and then went to sleep (LD started at 3 am of my local time) with hope that my crazy mind will show me inspiration in my dreams. My mind decided to stay in gutter and I dreamed about two-headed readhead which isn’t exactly fitting to the theme… unless she was really tiny and you could carry her in your pocket….

Anyway, going to fill myself with coffee, put together some ideas and then start putting it to something playable (sadly most of the good ideas I have I probably won’t be able to do in time, sigh…)

All right, once again I’m in. This time I like most of the possible themes, so I hope it will be fun.

I will be probably using Unity, alternatively c#/c++, or maybe I’ll try something new for me this time (flash or javascript). It pretty much depends on the theme.
And I’ll be of course using my now almost copyrightable “art” style consisting of mostly random scratches on the paper or with tablet, if the theme and idea will permit it.